a Sun Never Goes Out
by Heaven's Eagle
Summary: But you are the sun, and now - without ever meaning to - you are going out. This is what it is like for the angels ejected from Heaven - their home.


**I've seen all sorts from Castiel's point of view, but I wanted to write one from one of the other angel's PoV. If you follow Dawn, you already know who Sorath is. Who _you_ are, right now.**

**Un-beta'd.**

**Please Review. =/**

**Also make sure to read the post-publish companion fic to this one "When Angels Fall", byt nicitta. For reals. Do it.**

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You don't notice, at first, the pressure that builds in the air, like an ache. Your favourite heaven is always hot, the teenage girl who inhabits it all claws and wild flights. Be it desert sunlight or burning earth, her heaven is always hot. You have always loved her heaven, partially because you are of the sun and the heat makes your feathers shiver, and partially because the girl's story is so _compelling_. Of the times whence she died, you observed many times. She was – is – a fighter, a primal creature of endless fury and ne'er-say-die. For that, for not falling into the meek role she was assigned, she was slain.

And now she spends forever doing just that, fighting, winning. Revelling.

The first you notice of it is when a Grace you recognise bursts into flames nearby, spewing sparks and golden orange beams of light. It is one of your Captains, an angel who looks up to you, _depends_ on you, an angel just like the so many you have failed before and vowed never to do so again. Though you never want to, you abandon this mortal soul and her heaven, flapping your brilliant sunstone orange wings so that you dash through a million other heavens and to your Captain's side.

Eoth cries out, writhing under the pressure that is expanding from Heaven's centre, and finally you feel it, suffocating. You have never taken a vessel before, though you are well-versed on the theory, and somehow, this is what you have always imagined being unable to breathe would be like, if you had need of air.

"Sorath!" Eoth cries, and you reach out with your left wing, the crystal whining and fracturing under the strain of whatever is happening, of what is compressing Heaven downwards. You have felt this pressure before, this drag like gravity that sucks forever down. It is like being trapped in Hell, or flying too close to a sun.

Vainly, you fight back, struggling to stay up, wings snapping as your Grace thunders about you, but the invisible force continues pressing downwards, pulling at your wings and crushing your true form in on itself, mauling your Grace. Beside you, you can see Eoth starting to die, his Grace being torn to icy blue ribbons. His wings, in harmony with yours, rise and fall, heavy, like a mortal bird too wounded to fly.

The pain starts to eat into you, and you realise that you were only spared so long because of your elevated rank, your superior Grace. All across Heaven, the cries start to go up, the shrill wordless ringing of tortured angels mixed with garbled shouts of Enochian.

Eoth joins in, his true voice swelling around you like a bubble. All too soon, it bursts, your own voice joining the wave of noise that is filling Heaven. On the edge of your senses, underneath all the pain and tearing of your Grace, of all the Graces that surround you behind Heaven's Gates, you can feel the millions upon millions of human souls that reside here, all pausing. They are not attuned to the angels, most of them barely aware of their own reality, but at this moment, when every seraph has begun to scream and every Grace is exploding, they can sense something is wrong.

Even they can hear the howling of the angels.

Eoth cries out your name again, slurred and in fractured Enochian, and he reaches for you with his wings, desperate. A ribbon of his Grace meets a splinter of yours and you reach too, brushing your feathers against his smoky grey ones. Though the pressure filling Heaven's borders, the gravity that has come out of nowhere, is shredding Graces, your Grace still surrounds you, like rags garbing a human.

You wish, how deeply you wish, that you had an answer, that you could rise through the ache and spread your wings and assure him that all will be well. You wish, how deeply you wish, that you could protect your Captain, that you could gather together your entire Garrison and safeguard them.

You wish, how deeply you wish, that you do not fail them again.

Once more, you struggle to rise, pushing back against the gravity with all the strength you can muster, and you are punished for your efforts, slamming back down to Heaven's ground floor. All around you, angels are collecting, pulled and dragged and thrown into the very bottom of your home, and the endless ringing of your voices, the shrill cries that are enough to deafen an entire planet, never cease. Not for one moment.

Without the need to breathe, there is no need to stop, and Graces are mingling and wings are flailing and everybody is writhing together in one big mass of celestial agony, feathers sliding together and colours darkening to red and black. You scream, as loud as your old Captain ever screamed when you failed _him_, when he was tortured, and your voice is lost in the cacophony of keening that has never been heard in Heaven before.

The pressure becomes greater and greater, and you – and yes, there are the other Lieutenants and the Commanders and even Joshua, who has long ceased to be considered an archangel, who has long since dared to leave the Garden – are flattened against Heaven's floor, where once so many were smote.

Perhaps he has returned. Perhaps this time, Castiel has come to finish the job and is smiting the remainder of his kin. It is a thought that you never believed you would think, because Castiel was your highest Captain and you have tried so hard but perhaps you have failed him just one too many times. Of course, it is absurd – Castiel has long since abandoned the kind of power that would allow him to smite so many at once.

All around you, the wordless ringing turns, slowly changing into a shrieking cry for your Father, for God. "_God!_" You join in, begging for His presence, for His help. Surely He will not allow this, even though He has allowed so much, surely He will stop _this_, save His angels from this _agony._

You are, all of you, ignored. There is no response, and soon you feel Heaven's ground floor begin to give way under the pressure of this impossible gravity, under the weight of so many boiling angels – for you are compressed and screaming and writhing and the angels have begun to _boil_, and you are not exempt. The gravity starts to burn, to sear your wings and the fragments of Grace that are still your own.

You are not the first to fall through. Heaven's floor crumbles under you and your kin, and far away (and yet so close you feel every one of her screams, shocked and terrified, in a way you have not heard anybody else's), Naya'il slips between the cracks and is ejected from Heaven, her boiling form erupting into a corporeal body and igniting. Her torn Grace wraps around her like chains, her brilliant silver wings snapped backwards and outwards as she plummets. The sound of her crystal fracturing is unnaturally loud, audible even over the continued shrills of Heaven's whole Host in anguish.

She Falls, her Grace burning away and her wings melting like a smote demon, becoming a comet in Earth's night sky.

For the next eternal moment, fragments of Heaven's floor break away, cracking apart like rips in time, and angels who cannot help themselves slip through and ignite and Fall, wings and Grace combusting, reduced to ashes. Angels whom you have known since the dawn of time, brothers and sisters you know well. _Illia, Reinath, Maeth, Ketriel, Mathius, Quetzie, Kíadré, Neia, Akriel, Zemaya, Bethor, Camael, Dardariel, Jael, Iaoth, Mihr, Rathanael, Eoth, Zaphiel…_

Each one is distinct, unique, and you can feel the exact moment each one ignites and Falls and is lost to you. Lost to Heaven, their home. You feel the scorch of every lost Grace.

Finally, the pressure stops, and an eerie silence descends upon you and your kin. The Host goes still, unmoving, not making a sound. You can still sense the cracks in Heaven, the gaps through which your brethren fell, and those comets that were angels only moments ago are still Falling, and you can still feel their pain.

But for a moment, there is silent bliss, and everything is suspended.

Then, all at once, a wave of _force_ erupts from the uppermost reaches of Heaven, and the floor dissolves under its power. The angels spill from their home, wings broken, stunned and afraid, and suddenly it's all so much worse.

There is a split second, a fragment of time (which has never meant much to you before) where you think that maybe it would have been better. _Better if Castiel had come to smite us._ Then you forget your kin, the other angels who are so close to you and yet further then they have ever been. Your Grace – the ribbons that remain – encircles you like chains, manacles that silence you. You cannot scream, you can hardly move.

Air explodes into your chest and you realise for the first time that you _have_ a chest, that you have begun to ache from the lack of breath. And you don't care. You don't care because your Grace, so perversely confining, has ignited and burst into heat and light so liquid, so profoundly painful that you cannot possibly call it fire.

You Grace burns and melts and kindles your wings, heavy and useless as the wind that avulses them strips feathers and breaks crystal. You feel them crack and splinter, and your feathers disintegrate under the heat, your crystal turning to liquid.

Blind from the light of your own burning comet, your Grace and wings alight with pain and liquid fire, you plummet towards Earth, your senses fraying and vaporising. You cannot feel anything around you, and though you know there are other angels all around you, their suffering does not touch you. For a moment, you hope (absurdly) that it is your own anguish that is causing that, that it is so excruciating that it has eclipsed theirs.

For a tiny moment, you even believe it.

But then you feel your Grace leave you, like a human losing their heart, and your wings become ash that trails in the wake of your effervescent descent. And you know, you know so completely, that you have Fallen.

It is the fear that bubbles into horror, the slow boil of emotion that is so _sharp_, so familiar and yet so _new_ in this abrupt physical form, so literal that you can _feel_ it – not just acknowledge the reaction and the burst of colour that accompanies an emotion, but actually _feel_ it, like a sharp knife in your gut. It is the searing pain that is so very different from how your Grace melted, how your wings crumbled away, the touch of the pyre that surrounds your fall against your skin. It is the dull ache in your chest as you struggle to breathe through the speed and the inferno, the dizziness that should mean nothing to someone who has flown as high as you.

All of this erupts in your impossible new body as if you are a newborn volcano and you understand that you, you and your entire family, are lost. You have been condemned, you have _Fallen_. Somehow, you have been thrown down from Heaven like Lucifer was thrown down so many millennia ago, and the entire Host hurled with you.

And you know, so suddenly, so clearly, that you are dead. You are an angel. But you are not an angel. There are no more angels – you have all been ejected from Heaven, left to Fall to earth in a scattered blanket of living comets.

You are an angel. But you are not an angel. You are a silent ball of pain and fire and terror, and you are never going home.

It is then, finally, that you slam into the ground, always so far away, so insignificant; it is far too solid, far too extreme. It cannot possibly be so _real_, and yet it is so important that you have crashed into the mortal domain. Everything goes black, noise filling every one of your senses, so weak that they are, and you are completely still.

You are an angel. But you are Fallen, you are mortal. Insignificant. Nothing.

You were an angel.

Now you are dead.


End file.
